She’s an Oscar winner and France’s highest-paid actress. He’s the macho star of B-List films like My Father the Hero. Now Juliette Binoche and Gerard Depardieu are locked in a war of words that has the French film community shrieking Mon Dieu!

Speaking to Austrian magazine Profil last week, Depardieu, 61, questioned Binoche’s status as a film icon: “Please can you explain to me what the mystery of Juliette Binoche is meant to be?” He added that he “would really like to know why she has been esteemed for so many years.”

“She has nothing — absolutely nothing.”

Far too modest to suggest that Depardieu might envy her success, Binoche suggested that he might be crazy instead. “I don’t know him and I don’t know what I did to him,” she said on BBC Radio 4. “I understand that you don’t have to like everyone and you [can] dislike someone’s work. But I don’t understand the violence [of his words]….I think it has to do with himself—there’s something going on.”